The leading French centre of competence in energetics-mechanics, the Technology Centre has asserted itself in recent years as a centre of excellence in optics, with the Fresnel Institute in Saint Jerome, and the arrival of the OAMP (Marseille Observatory and the Space Astronomy Laboratory), and its main componant, the Marseille Astrophysics Laboratory (LAM) in the Technology centre scheduled for 2007.
Both these major activities are complemented by the skills of the site's laboratories in mathematics, computer science, microelectronics as well as information and communication technology.